Workshop 3: Teaching Poetry

Jack Wilde's Lesson on Distinguishing Poetry and Prose

Jack Wilde uses a model to teach differences between poetry and prose.

Like many other middle level students, the children in New Hampshire teacher
Jack
Wilde's fifth-grade class have had limited experience with
poetry. So Jack's first priority—starting at the beginning
of the school year—is to immerse his students in the genre.

One day each week, Jack has the children choose their reading from a
poetry cart—a selection of 75 to 80 books Jack keeps in his classroom.
The students also collect personal anthologies, selecting poems they
want to own, and, occasionally, memorize. By the time they start writing
poems,
they know that poetry is more than rhyming words. They've begun
to think about what's possible in poetry that's not possible
in prose.

Jack begins his formal unit on writing poetry late in the school year.
The first activity—a class discussion on what makes a poem a poem—requires
the students to draw upon the experiences they've had reading poetry
over the past eight months.

For Write in the Middle, Jack shares a mini-lesson on the differences
between poetry and prose based on the model "The Truth About Why
I Love Potatoes" by Mekeel McBride.